The unemployment rate among Chilean workers reached 10% in the June-August 2026 quarter, according to BioBioChile, citing the latest report from the Observatorio del Contexto Económico (Economic Context Observatory) of the Universidad Diego Portales (UDP), a private university in Santiago. It is the highest figure since the March-May 2021 quarter.
Among foreigners, the indicator moved in the opposite direction. It fell to 6.8%, which is 1.3 points lower than a year ago. The study warns that this improvement is only apparent.
The reason is arithmetic. The unemployment rate measures how many of those looking for work cannot find it. If the people leaving the country are precisely those without jobs, the rate falls even if no new jobs are created. It is like raising a class's average because the students with the worst grades dropped out.
According to the report, the foreign labor force is shrinking faster than employment due to a gradual process of Venezuelan emigration. That group has posted 10 consecutive months of declines, with some 57,000 fewer people over the past year.
The profile of those leaving is clear. They are mainly men aged 25 to 49, with completed higher education and less than five years living in Chile. Juan Bravo, director of the observatory, explained that other effects also play a role, although the source does not detail them.
For the Venezuelans who stay, work has become more precarious. Their informality rate, meaning jobs without a contract or social security contributions, rose from 27.9% to 34.4%. Among other foreigners, by contrast, formal employment is growing strongly.
The hardest blow fell on formal salaried employment in the private sector, which lost almost 154,000 jobs in one year. About 99,000 of them belonged to Chileans, the largest job destruction since 2021. Some 55,000 belonged to foreigners, the largest drop on record, worse even than during the pandemic.
If you work under contract at a private company, that is the segment contracting the most. To give you an idea, 154,000 jobs is equivalent to emptying the Estadio Nacional, Chile's national stadium, twice.
José Noguera, an economist and academic at the Faculty of Administration and Economics of the Universidad de Santiago, said that Venezuelans from lower social strata are taking, in quotation marks, the "best wages" in the informal sector, displacing Chileans. The BioBioChile article describes this as unfair competition in informal employment.
The report's diagnosis is that the Chilean labor market is deteriorating and carries structural problems. The next quarterly measurement will show whether unemployment among Chileans remains in double digits.